


Other People's Fairy Tales

by MotherInLore



Category: Weetzie Bat Series - Francesca Lia Block
Genre: Any Resemblance to the Actual Berkeley is Coincidental, Background Relationships, Collage, Gen, Identity Reveal, Really It was a good solid B+ but still, Slice of Life, The Bat Family's B+ Parenting, canon pairings - Freeform, film studies - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 08:31:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20721257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: Witch Baby re-watchesThe Jayne Mansfield Fan Clubfor the first time since she was thirteen.





	Other People's Fairy Tales

People are starting to rediscover the films of My Secret Agent (Max) Loverman. Netflix recommends them to people who request Kevin Smith, or M. Knight Shaylaman. The college kids who got into him the first time around are starting to make Full Professor here and there. Quentin Tarantino mentions him in an interview. Weetzie Bat makes it onto _Faces of the 90’s _listicles.

Witch Baby Bat, majoring in “Why do People DO this Shit” (Psych, with a minor in Anthro) at Berkeley, has very complicated feelings about this.

MySecret has never been the one of her three dads that she goes to for Dad things, like learning to ride a bike or fix a car. He has never been the one of her three dads who did the Dad things that a baby Witch Baby wished none of them would do, like loom over her until she does her homework, or ground her for cutting off all her sister’s hair in the night. That was almost always all Dirk, who made himself into the father he’d missed so much, or Duck, who liked it when Dirk babied him but had still been the oldest of nine. But MySecret was the one Witch Baby called “Dad,” because he was hers. He was _hers_ and that was why she was a Bat at all, why she’d been left on the doorstep of the little house with the candy-colored roof and not some other doorstep. He was hers and they could look at each other when the news was showing how the world was destroying itself today, and the same sad frown with angry corners would be on both pairs of pouty lips, and Witch Baby took the stills for most of the Loverman movies because she and her dad had eyes that saw the same things.

It would be easier, Witch Baby thinks, if the Secret Agents, the Lovermanistas, were more into the Social Justice Warrior side of Max. If they’d decided his best films were _Coyote, Baby Jah-Love, Los Diablos._ But no, they go straight for the autobiographical ones; the ones about Max and his family, disguised under layers of magic realism (not as thick a layer as they assume) and melodrama, but basically, Witch Baby’s memories through Max’s eye.

Witch Baby has shaved her wild Medusa curls, her tilty purple stare is reserved for her own feet, her Bobby McGee boyfriend when he’s around, and her friend Julie – her first friend she’s ever had who calls her by her legal name. Witch Baby is hiding in the Berkeley campus, and her name is Lily, and when Julie’s friend Chad starts telling her about how _The Goat Guys_ subverts the paradigm of the rock n’ roll film by making the leader delicate, blonde "Sierra" (played by Cherokee), who just wants to help her friends feel better about themselves, Witch Baby (or maybe it’s Lily) does not tell him that she was the drummer for the Goat Guys, nor about the hours of family discussions about whether Max and Weetzie and Ping and Valentine were going to play them onscreen, or if their kids were going to play themselves. 

When she first taught herself to play the drums, Witch Baby hid. She stapled musty foam mattresses and ancient shag carpet all over the walls and ceiling of the garden shed, and she drummed in the dark until the drums were _hers,_ and then she let the door crack open sometimes but still locked it behind her when she left. If you’d asked her at the time, she would have said it was so Cherokee didn’t take over the drums the way she had with the salsa dancing before that, and the painting before that, and Weetzie and Max and Dirk and Duck first of all. Years later, though, watching a skinny, tangle-haired goblin throwing her whole body into a black-and-white drum solo on someone else’s computer screen, she wonders if it was Cherokee’s appropriation she was so afraid of.

Kee could be selfish, sometimes, in the way people can be selfish when they are brought up amidst so much plenty they can’t even imagine that someone else might feel lack. My Secret was the kind of selfish you get when you know nobody else will give you what you need if you don’t just take it. He had needed, he had taken, and he left them all transformed. My Secret Agent Lover Man was their visionary, their wizard. He was the one who turned a squeaky-voiced waitress with a bleach-blonde flattop and her friends into the Dangerous Angels of Loverman Films. He was probably the reason they stayed friends, this one random cluster of Boho Angelinos who were suddenly something bigger, something slinkster-cool. Dirk and Duck didn’t move out into their own place until the movies stopped. 

And now Witch- Lily- now she is eating feta-artichoke pizza one handed while she tries to design a psych experiment and keeps thinking instead about the email her mother sent her, about the producer she met in a pink hotel and how Max is working on the script for another movie. And his daughter doesn’t know if she’s more afraid that she’ll get sucked back in, or that her dad –_ hers_ – doesn’t need her any more and never did.

Julie is basically a hug on two feet. Her round face and her teddy bear hat and her daybed full of ball-shaped stuffed animals. She knows Lily is Witch Baby and she hasn’t pointed it out to Chad. And she goes to punk shows and knows who Angela Carter is. Lily hasn’t had anyone around who can make her this happy just by existing since Angel Juan. Julie’s "Gender Roles in Horror Film" class is covering _The Jayne Mansfield Fan Club._ Because it is Julie who is inviting her along to watch it in Viewing Room Two in the library with some of Julie’s other friends and classmates, Witch Baby thinks about it instead of just saying no.

“You can give us all the inside dirt that would be on the directors’ commentary track if there was one,” Julie pleads.

“It literally came out the year I was born, Jules. I wasn’t exactly paying attention.”

And maybe Julie sees something on Witch Baby’s face. Maybe she knows some of the back story. Or Chad does. Or maybe she just knows her friend Lily can be as prickly as a Joshua tree when she wants to be. All she says is, “No big.”

And Witch- Lily thinks about it. And she says, “Y’know what, I think maybe I should watch that one again. I was like, thirteen the last time. And now I’m as old as Weetzie was when she made it. Maybe I’ll … sure.”

There is a kind of ritual, Witch Baby learned in one of her anthro classes, that shows up in communities that value cohesion, where the participants are required to make themselves vulnerable in front of strangers. Confess their sins, or cry, or kiss people… Evangelical altar calls. Fraternity hazings. EST workshops. She thinks about those as she clumps into Viewing Room Two, which Julie and her friends are turning into a giant blanket fort. She recognizes a few of them before Julie introduces them. Amon-Eros was in her Physics For People Who Need to get the Science Requirement Out of the Way class, and she only remembers him because no one else is called Amon-Eros. Jennifer and Jessica were on the same dorm floor last year and she can’t remember which of them is which. Lily and Freya staffed a table for the Gay-Straight Alliance during Orientation week. Everyone looked at bald Lily with her seven earrings and one eyebrow ring and her leather jacket, and strawberry blonde Freya with her sparkly tee shirt and ruffled mini skirt, and everyone who felt the need to remark on it guessed wrong about which one was straight. Chad is there. A few other people. It could be worse. Everyone finds an inflatable armchair or a spherical stuffed animal or someone’s lap to lean on. Jennifer-or-Jessica takes charge of the remote. “I_ will_ pause the movie whenever people start talking too much.” Someone flips out the lights. The movie starts.

Duck Drake, looking horribly young and bruiseable, has washed the gel out of his flat-top so it flops into his eyes in a precursor to the mid-nineties bowl cut. His huge light eyes brim with tears as he pauses in the doorway Witch Baby took her first steps out of, then shakes his head without looking back at Ping Chong, who is playing Duck’s girlfriend this time around. Witch Baby can’t remember what their names are supposed to be in the movie. It’s Duck and Ping, and Duck’s character is based on Max, and Ping’s is based on Weetzie. She’s just going to call them Dax and Wing in her head through this whole movie. Ping is not a very good actress, but her stiffness works in this scene, where she looks stunned nearly speechless. “I love you, sweetie,” she whispers, and Du- Dax’s face crumbles.

“I can’t do this,” he says, “I- I just… that you could – I can’t be here right now. I just can’t.” And he runs for the motorcycle in the driveway and zooms down the street Witch Baby learned to rollerskate on.

“Dude,” says someone who isn’t Chad or Amon-Eros. “That dude looks _so_ fuckin’ gay.”

“You’re projecting,” Chad says back. “ ‘Cause everyone knows Duck Drake _is_ gay.”

“This was pre -AIDS crisis,” Freya pipes up. “All the out gay men looked like Tom Selleck. The Castro Clones.”

“Shut up!” says Jennifer-or-Jessica.

So they shut up while Dax gets drunk in a bar full of menacing-looking toughs (Dirk, able to wear his Mohawk onscreen for once, and Valentine and Coyote, who you can only really read as menacing if you don’t know them and are also racist) and stumbles out into a night that is too foggy for LA, and pulls a tattered flyer off a telephone pole for the Jayne Mansfield Fan Club. “That’s tonight,” Dax slurs. “It’ll be somewhere t’ kill a couple hours, anyway.”

Max’s and Witch Baby’s visits to Vixanne’s patchwork stucco gallimaufry of a house, to the flickering, opiate territory of the fan club, were ten years apart. He was a man at the time, if a young one, and Witch Baby was a tiny girl with old eyes. But Max’s version of the house matches the one she sees in her dreams sometimes. It’s a movie, so he can make things skitter and lurk in the shadows, when you were never sure, in real life, that they were there.

Weetzie, playing “Tressa Fox,” the lead witch of the coven that is disguised as a fan club, welcomes a shy Dax into the house with a bubbly, scratchy-voiced laugh and a smack on the cheek with glossy lips. She welcomes him into the circle of people in blonde wigs and they all imitate the siren noise from The Girl Can’t Help It. It’s kooky and wild and looks kind of fun. The camera swirls. Someone offers Dax some rock candy. Someone else hands him a skewer of marshmallows to toast over the open brazier in the middle of the room. “Tressa Fox” shoves a gooey marshmallow into his mouth off her own skewer. A few wisps of dark hair show from under Tressa’s blonde wig. So far, this movie and Los Diablos are the only ones where Weetzie didn’t bleach her hair.

The camera cuts back to the scuzzy looking bar where Dax first saw the flyer. Wing, either petulant or determined, depending on how much you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for Ping Chong’s so-so acting skills, is standing in the middle, wearing a little dress with puffed sleeves and looking lost. Dirk, Mohawk rampant and metal studs in his jacket all agleam, stalks up to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. “You sure you wanna be here, baby doll?”

The scene cuts again to the Fan Club, and Jennifer-or-Jessica hits pause, then backframes until the screen shows the fragile skin of Dirk’s naked skull again, as he bends his head over Ping. “You guys, watch the Dirk McDonald scenes, right? I mean, _watch_ them. It’s totally clutch ‘cause the movie makes them all look so threatening. Big guy with the leather and the studs and the hair. But he never does anything. If you look at it from the girlfriend’s point of view, everything he does is so, so sweet and supportive and shit. It’s like, he’s using all the mainstream prejudices against punk culture to make this scary and he’s subverting them at the same time. _So _ clutch.”  


“I’ll bet that was Dirk’s idea,” Lily mutters from her inflatable armchair, and she feels the heads turning to look at her.

The next twenty minutes of the movie are pretty typical horror film stuff. Dax gets fed rock candy and soda and marshmallows. In the background it looks like someone’s marshmallow sets their wig on fire, and the Jayne Mansfield siren noise becomes a scream, but no one reacts except Dax. He runs into a rundown looking kitchen, and it looks like the sink is full of viscera. He looks again, and the sink is empty, but something slick and wormlike disappears down the drain. It looks like there is someone hanging from the tree outside a window.

“I left my girlfriend,” Dax mumbles. “She told me she was pregnant. And then she told me she wasn’t sure the baby was mine.”

Tressa Fox strokes his cheek and says, “Aww, baby, forget about all that, honey, don’t dwell on that,” and kisses him. He stares at her and she pulls off her Jayne wig and puts it on his head. Duck is a much better actor than Ping. You can see him forgetting.

Witch Baby draws her knees up to her chest and hugs them. She remembers what’s coming. She’s trying to see it as clearly as she can, to see young Weetzie and young My Secret and the layers of storytelling they had to build up, to turn this time of their lives into forgiveness, a beginning instead of an end. She reminds herself of the other stories that are happening at the same time, the ones that Max and Weetzie didn’t see, couldn’t let themselves see, if they were going to have their love story.

Jennifer-or-Jessica forgets her own rule about talking as Tressa Fox leads Dax into her bed. She’s excited by the way the blood that wells on Dax’s skin when Tressa touches him could be an exaggeration of kinky period sex. She likes the way the scene shifts back to menacing Dirk, shirtless and tattooed, reaching around Wing to stroke her belly and saying, “He’s gone, baby, but I’m not. I’ll always be here.” So Dax is not only forgetting, but being forgotten. She likes the way, when Tressa says, “I’ve never had children; power comes with a price,” the camera lingers on her belly – soft, for a twenty-something indie movie star, and with obvious stretch marks. If Tressa Fox had never had children, _what had been inside her?_ (The real answer, of course, was, “Cherokee,” who was about four months old when they started filming.)

“Dude,” says Chad, “That’s fucked up.”

“You really want fucked up,” Witch Baby says without thinking, without looking up at the heads that have turned to her again, “Remember that Weetzie’s pretending to have sex with Duck Drake because her Secret Agent Lover Man is telling her to, and Duck’s boyfriend is probably watching from behind the camera.”

Jennifer-or-Jessica pauses the movie.

“And if you want _really_fucked up,” Witch Baby goes on, “Max is having them do this, in front of him and probably Dirk, about a year after she actually slept with Duck and Dirk, behind Max’s back.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” says the guy who said Duck’s hair was “so gay.” “You are _shittin’ _me.”

“I’m not,” Witch Baby says, and Julie’s hand is on her wrist where it bends around her knee. “Weetzie wanted a baby. My Secret didn’t. Dirk loves Weetzie and is also a total, total dad, and gay couples had a harder time adopting back then. So they got drunk and had some threesomes. My Secret got mad and left and came back after Cherokee was born and they started making this movie.”

“Duuuuude,” says the guy, and Chad, on the other side of Julie, puffs up a little, angry at not having known this about a director he’s into.

“Annnd, you know this, how?” he asks. Everything but his mouth is calling bullshit. Witch Baby stares back at him, tilty purple eyes never leaving his face. The light from the TV screen is probably leaching the color out of them, her photographer-brain thinks. She probably looks like a black-and-white film. She snatches a pencil from the one of Julie’s hands that isn’t holding hers, flips it like a drumstick, and flashes him the Goat Guys horns.

Chad really isn’t as slow as he pretends to be. He wrinkles his eyebrows at her for like two seconds and then his mouth drops open. “Oh, shit,” he says. “Lily Bat. Lily _Bat!_ I’ve been hanging out with Motherfucking _Witch Baby!”_

The movie, paused for too long, starts up again. Jessica-or-Jennifer pulls the remote from Jennifer-or-Jessica’s limp hand and hits stop.

“It’s Lily,” Lily says in a dead flat voice.

Chad doesn’t quite get the hint. He has a few more “sooo cools” to get out and (to be fair) an apology for the time he lectured her about the Goat Guys movie. He wants to know what they’re like, which would be an impossible question even if Lily wanted to answer it. Amon-Eros, bright red, admits he’s got a poster of Dirk McDonald as Elvis from _Shangri-L.A._ on his dorm wall. “And he’s your dad. I am so not mentally prepared for this moment.” Jessica-or-Jennifer, surprisingly, wants to know about Valentine Jah-Love and his set designs for _Los Diablos._ Lily starts curling in like a salted snail.

Julie squeezes her knee. “Guys,” she says, “can we just not? Lily’s our friend. She’s another psych major with weird parents. OK?”

And they do cool off, eventually. They go back to the movie, eventually. Lily would bet, though, that Jennifer-or-Jessica is the only one who could actually tell you how Dax manages to break Tressa Fox’s spell and come back home to Wing (holding a baby Cherokee in her first film role, Dirk-and-his-Mohawk nowhere in sight) and ask her, as she asks him, “Can you forgive me?” And Lily would bet that the only reason Jennifer-or-Jessica could tell you is because she’s seen the movie before.

About half of them just wander off when the movie’s over, going off into their own stories again. Chad and Julie and Freya and Witch Baby and Chad’s dudebro friend make their way to the late-night Mexican place a couple blocks from the library. Their talk stays light and gossipy, letting Witch Baby stay quiet without feeling left out. They pull up rickety molded plastic chairs around a scarred linoleum-topped table. She and Julie split an enormous bean-and-cheese burrito with guacamole on top. Each of the guys orders a whole one to himself. Freya gets a virgin margarita and snitches from everyone’s tortilla chips. Witch Baby shakes Tabasco sauce into a mango Jarritos soda. Chad’s dudebro friend is named Shawn, apparently, and he pretends to be scandalized.

“So...” Freya says, when everyone is at least halfway full and maybe a little sleepy. She looks at Witch Baby. “Max Loverman freaked out and left his pregnant girlfriend, and came back a year later and made a movie about a guy who freaks out and leaves his pregnant girlfriend?”

Witch Baby nearly spits out her mouthful of guacamole. “Pretty much,” she says, smirking. “I mean, I can’t exactly say Dad doesn’t have any imagination, but he doesn’t just… make stuff up very much.”

“Huh,” says Chad. “I can’t decide whether I like him more or less for that.”

“What I wanna know,” says Freya, “And you totally don’t have to tell me if you don’t want me to, Lily, but… well, I wanna know: If Duck Drake was playing a guy based on Max, and Ping Chong was playing a girl based on Weetzie, who was Weetzie playing? Was there a real life Tressa Fox?”

Altar calls, Witch Baby thinks. Trust Falls. Opening the door of the garden shed and letting your slam-jam drums rattle the windows for once. “My birth mom,” she says aloud. “Vixanne Wigg.”

Maybe they’d guessed that already, she thinks as she looks up from her plate at Jul- at her and Julie’s friends around the table. They’re kind of nodding like, yeah, that makes sense. Then Julie sits up suddenly and chokes on an ice cube.

“Ohmigod,” she squeaks when she can breathe again. “Ohmigod. Lily. Is that why your family calls you Witch Baby? Because your mom was --”

“The wicked witch in their fairy tale?” Witch Baby finishes for her. “I mean, I was generally kind of witchy, I guess, but yeah, that was part of it. They were about halfway through filming when Vixanne left me on their doorstep.”

“Duuuuude,” Shawn says, slowly and reverently, “that is hella fucked up.”

“No!” Witch Baby protests. “Well, yes, I mean, it is fucked up, but it’s just like regular levels of ‘family fucks you up’ fucked up. They broke up, they had kids, they got back together, they all raised both kids no matter who was related to who. They’re OK, I’m OK, it worked out.”

“No,” Shawn insists around a mouthful of burrito. “No, that is actually fucked up. That name. Dude! I get the adoption thing and it’s cool you’re OK but, 'Witch Baby?' The guy hates this woman so much he makes a goddamn horror movie about their time together, and then he names the kid after her? Jesus, you think if Vixanne had been a Nazi instead of a witch they would’ve called you Eva Braun?”

Witch Baby snorts chili-laced mango soda halfway up her nose at the sheer degree of wrong in that image. Her mouth fills with slippery, blobby words like the tapioca beads in a glass of bubble tea, too many of them to sort out into sentences. But, she thinks. But. But Weetzie and Ping and their made-up ceremonies to honor the Mother Goddess when she and Cherokee got their periods. But Weetzie’s arms, warm around her adopted daughter, while she talks about the strength and courage it can take to face it when something’s wrong instead of trying to smooth it away. But Dirk and Duck thanking her for saying the hard things when they couldn’t and bringing Duck’s mother back to him. But a ghost and a gift and a demon ghoulie-ghoul, in a basement in the Meat Packing District in New York City. But witches can be honored. 

Julie pats her on the back and squeezes her in a sideways hug. “Sorry, Lily,” she says, “We love you, and I know you love your family and they love you back. But that nickname really is messed up.”

Witch Baby sips her mango-and Tabasco soda and crunches ice cubes and thinks. Max and Weetzie and Duck and Dirk had a fairy-tale love, starting with a magic lamp and a wish. But they’d needed that wicked witch. They’d needed her so badly that when Vixanne left her child and her voodoo dolls behind on the front step, walked away into her own story and stopped threatening them, they’d made another one. Max turned the people in his life into stories. For better and for worse.

“So call me Lily,” Lily says aloud.


End file.
